An errant cruise missile on a test run slammed into the Tooele County desert near the Nevada border, causing a small explosion but no injuries.
The crash in remote western Utah occurred at 11:15 a.m. Thursday at Ibapah, south of Wendover and about 185 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.Staff Sgt. Sonja Wittington, a spokeswoman with Hill's 388th Tactical Fighter Wing, said the inert AGM 129 cruise missile had been released from a B-52 bomber and had been tracked for three hours into a four-hour test run when it went down. The crash occurred on Bureau of Land Management property and caused minimal damage to the wilderness, Wittington said.
"It was flying along its programmed course when something happened. We don't know why it happened."
Wittington said a team of investigators will probe the cause, but may not arrive at any definitive answers for several months because every possible scenario will be explored.
Test runs of cruise missiles are conducted about twice a year at the 900,000-acre Utah Test and Training Range to gauge the accuracy and effectiveness of the system and root out possible glitches.
On Thursday, two pilots of airborne F-15s visually tracked the missile's path. In addition, Wittington said another plane tracked the missile on radar.
"By all reports the missile was behaving fine and there were no reported problems," prior to the crash, she said.
She said the B-52 carrying the missile was from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, but she did not know where Thursday's test flight originated.
Over the years, wayward missiles have crashed in Utah multiple times. The most serious incident occurred in 1997 when a cruise missile slammed into two unoccupied trailers of a cosmic ray observatory at Dugway Proving Ground.
In 1990, a cruise missile landed 25 miles from Delta and within a quarter mile of a busy highway. A year later, another missile hit the ground within a half mile of the same highway and about 40 miles from Delta.
In 1996, a $1 million Air Force missile crashed near Sevier Dry Lake in Millard County after it had been in the air for 20 minutes.